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As part of Radio 3’s Proms Marathon Monday, Ian Skelly introduces the second of our Proms highlights from the 2025 season so far.

Rachmaninov’s ‘Paganini’ Variations (Friday 8 August)
Presented by Ian Skelly from the Royal Albert Hall in London

Paul Dukas: La Péri – Poème dansé
Sergey Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

Béla Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin

Beatrice Rana (piano)
ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Singers
ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Symphony Orchestra
Josep Pons (conductor)

Desire, brutality and the supernatural are shaken together in the orchestral kaleidoscope of Bartók’s ballet The Miraculous Mandarin. Josep Pons conducts the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Symphony Orchestra in the last of Bartók’s three great music-theatre scores, an electrifying fusion of folk music and modernism. Angular brilliance gives way to exotic, Impressionistic colours in Dukas’s exotic ‘danced poem’ La Péri. ‘Remarkable’ Italian pianist Beatrice Rana is the soloist in Rachmaninov’s thrilling Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.